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Are jewellery brands moving beyond his and hers once and for all? Prestige speaks to brands big and small about genderless jewellery.

The topic of boys in bling isn’t new – even in this publication, we’ve noticed a rising trend in mainstream jewellery brands that, in the past year or so, have recruited male ambassadors and male models to showcase their latest collections.

Did Harry Styles start it? Some have pointed to the British singer’s red-carpet look at the 2019 Met Gala, when he paired his Gucci ensemble with a single pearl earring. Perhaps. It certainly marked a turning point for men’s accessories in recent years – since then, Styles’ sartorial sensibility has transcended the simple earring to include your grandmother’s pearls and feather boas, inspiring his peers to dress louder, bolder and more gender-fluid. The Jonas Brothers have been spotted rocking the pearl necklace, as has Shawn Mendes. Jake Gyllenhaal has been photographed wearing a simple gold chain necklace time and again. Appropriating “men’s jewellery” to simply watches, signet rings and cufflinks is no longer so appropriate.

Gender is a construct, socially imposed from the moment we’re born, divided into different things, activities, colours or careers deemed suitable for boys or girls. There’s nothing inherent in flowers and dolls that make them more appealing to girls, nothing to dictate that rocket ships and cars are made for boys (girls can play too, but they’re then labelled tomboys) – but somehow they’ve persisted well into the 21st century.

Few things around us are truly gender-neutral, though with changing attitudes towards gender and deeper conversations into inclusivity and representation, this is now changing.

The concept of genderless jewellery isn’t anything new but the years 2020 and beyond have shown an evident shift from mere trend to something that’s here to stay. Previously, genderless jewellery was seen as out of the box and utterly revolutionary – Italian jewellery designer Aldo Cipullo was well ahead of his time when, in 1969 and 1971 respectively, he designed the Cartier Love and Juste un Clou bracelets. The former was inspired by everyday screws and the latter inspired by the humble nail, speaking to the designer’s minimalist and androgynous style beloved by both men and women.

These days, the concept of gender-free jewellery has become the norm. Embodying the more audacious spirit, Roman jeweller Bvlgari has arguably been a champion of this category with its bestselling B.zero1 collection. The collection debuted in 1999, when Bvlgari decided to marry innovation with one of Rome’s most historic monuments – the Colosseum – to create an entirely unconventional and avant-garde design. It was the first collection to be described as unisex by the brand itself.

A major success, it inspired more iterations, from collaborations with the late architect Zaha Hadid, who reimagined the industrial, cylindrical shape with her fluid, undulating aesthetics, to the latest B.zero1 Rock collection, which adds irreverent studs to the design’s central band.

Even pearls – not just traditionally viewed as feminine, but also decidedly old-fashioned – were given an unexpected boost of gender-free appeal when Mikimoto partnered with Comme des Garçons to unveil the fashion label’s first jewellery collection in 2020. As a forerunner of avant-garde fashion under the leadership of Rei Kawakubo, Comme des Garçons challenged the norms of beauty and tradition – why can’t men also wear pearls? Through the collaboration, both brands aimed to adorn the necks of all, regardless of age or gender. Pearls were suddenly cool again when paired with chunky silver chains and emblazoned with the Comme des Garçons logo.

Louis Vuitton’s Volt collection by artistic director Francesca Amfitheatrof is another stellar example of jewellery transcending borders and genders. The brand takes inspiration from its classic leitmotif, allowing the capital L and V letters to intersect, stack up together, or connect at the ends to form lightning-bolt and pulse-line designs – new shapes that are decidedly graphic and cool. There’s a chain-link design as well as a mesh, presenting the L and V letters in myriad textures, finishes and dimensions with great gender-neutral appeal.

Expanding the Volt collection this year, Louis Vuitton brings us the LV Volt Upside Down, playfully turning the letters L and V on their heads to form lively and energising patterns in yellow- and white-gold pendants, highlighted with diamonds. There are radiant rings and bracelets that can be stacked and layered, and even a rocker-chic ear cuff that adds a bold and modern twist to the collection.

Locally, we see brands enthusiastically dressing up our city’s most treasured male idols. Hong Kong-based designers, too, are creating for a more gender-fluid crowd, utilising abstract themes and aesthetics that are universally appealing.

ZNS Jewellery is a brand-new concept that comes under long-established Hong Kong jeweller KS Sze & Sons and is headed by co-founder and chief creative officer Alan Chan. The traditional jeweller and the well-known designer had no qualms about entering the jewellery market anew, with a new attitude and gender-free positioning they believe was still underrepresented.

A philosophy, rather than material inspiration was Chan’s starting point. “Despite my many years of experience in design, I’m a newcomer to the jewellery business and to come up with an original and unique concept in this competitive market is never easy,” he explains. “I looked back at my life to uncover the belief and values close to my heart that I wanted to crystalise in my design – the notion of “from eternity to infinity” is what I’ve instilled in my jewellery concept. This philosophy became the groundwork.”

ZNS, with an audacious motto – See No Limits – showcases jewellery that’s more abstract. “It shows the symbolic values instead of how much the diamond costs,” says Chan. The ZNS collection features the letter Z interpreted in various ways, depicting the infinity sign, or interlinked in chains. Many pieces are designed to be transformable, allowing the wearer to incorporate the jewellery into their everyday lifestyle with ease.

“With growing trends of brands positioning themselves around their values or attitudes, I envisage that gender-free or gender-specific will no longer be an issue,” Chan says of the future of jewellery design. “Only the ideas matter.”

And not just in fine jewellery. Boucheron has emerged as one of the traditional jewellery maisons to wholeheartedly embrace gender fluidity in its high-jewellery collections. The brand’s highly regarded Quatre fine-jewellery collection was already deemed unisex when it launched in 2004.

“High jewellery shouldn’t just be for women,” Claire Choisne, the house’s creative director said. “Boucheron wants men to wear our jewellery because we also design pieces for them. In fact, high jewellery has always been something for men: it was initially created for men, who adorned themselves with jewels at the time of the kings and maharajahs. It’s therefore quite natural to create high-jewellery pieces for men. Jewellery is not about gender, but about style. It allows everyone to express their unique personality.”

Choisne believes there should be no boundaries when it comes to who can and cannot carry her jewellery – this was evident in her jewellery campaign for her latest collection, where both sexes were dressed based solely on what looked good on them, regardless of their gender.

“We create jewellery for women and men who love freedom and independence and know what they want, and that best reflects their personality and taste,” says Choisne. “We want to enable them to tell their story in their own way. Creative freedom is at the heart of our philosophy. This means that our customers are free from any constraints when they wear our pieces … We want women and men to be able to wear our creations as they see fit.”

The post Genderless Jewellery: Going Beyond His and Hers appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

When the time has come to pop the question, you know you want to do it in style. There are plenty of picturesque locations to ask for your significant other’s commitment, but there are an equally large number of design for couple rings to select from as well. To help guide your decision, refer to this article to make your…

The post Finding The Perfect Couple Rings appeared first on The Luxe Insider.

In an exclusive interview, Claire Choisne describes how she immortalised Wladimir — the Boucheron family's beloved house pet — in the brand's latest novelties collection.

The post Boucheron’s Claire Choisne On Honouring the Maison’s Family Cat appeared first on LUXUO.

The oldest jeweller on the Place Vendôme in Paris is also the most forward-thinking. We talk to Boucheron's Claire Choisne about her latest high-jewellery collection and how she's making history by turning jewels holographic.

Frédéric Boucheron, who founded his maison in 1858, set up shop on Place Vendôme in Paris 35 years later, the first jeweller to do so. Old the name may be, but its collections are anything but traditional. Under the hand of creative director Claire Choisne, Boucheron has consistently revealed jewellery collections that stun with their avant-garde aesthetics, unusual sources of inspiration and mind-boggling techniques. Some of her best works could be seen in Boucheron’s Carte Blanche high jewellery collections, such as the Fleurs Éternelles rings in 2018, which immortalise real flower petals in gorgeous rings that will never lose their vibrance, shape or colour, and last year’s Contemplation collection, inspired by the sky, for which the house used NASA technology to capture stardust into rock-crystal shells, then set them with diamonds in a completely otherworldly necklace. Needless to say, I’ve admired Choisne’s creations for a long time.

This year, Choisne yet again exercises her creativity and technical prowess, this time with the Holographique collection. She’s long studied the relationship between light and colour, and the collection is her thesis. “I wanted to bring a new meaning to light,” she says. “To capture its very essence, which is colour. Every piece is like a prism, catching the complexity of light by representing every single colour held within it.”

Choisne studies Boucheron’s archives often, and colour has always been an important pillar to the house. “But I didn’t want to do something that I already see a lot of,” she says. “Normally, a colour collection was about one stone and how that stone gives you one colour. And then you play with different stones to form a palette. But I didn’t want to do that at Boucheron. For me, you see, I wanted to propose something new. And to work on distinguishing between light and colour and playing with holographic effects. That’s what I think colour means for Boucheron.”

Frédéric Boucheron would have approved of this collection, I tell Choisne, but she laughs and says she can’t know for sure. But her admiration for the founder is evident. “When I first arrived at the maison and discovered the collection of Frédéric Boucheron himself, I understood immediately that he was a visionary. He was quite free to create and invent new techniques. He was bold enough to cut rubies in the style of diamonds, which at that time was not a common thing to do,” she says.

Frédéric Boucheron also created the first question-mark necklace, which is now an emblematic design for the house. “It was a surprise for me to learn that it was Boucheron himself who invented this technique,” says Choisne. “I’m a jeweller too and I make jewellery, but when I looked at those question-mark necklaces, I said, ‘Wow.’ It looked really simple and pure in design, but it was so technically creative.”

Embodying the spirit of her predecessors, Choisne also chooses to be completely bold and innovative in her approach to jewellery. She says all her collections start out as dreams and of free brainstorming without limits. Then, she looks externally to express her vision. “I’ll ask people from different sectors other than jewellery what tools existed that could help me achieve those dreams,” she says. “I try to be as open-minded as possible and I’m not afraid to ask for help or advice from others to find a technique or a way to work with non-traditional jewellery materials.”

Choisne was inspired by artist Olafur Eliasson and architect Luis Berragan for the Holographique collection. She visited an exhibition in London when she began working on the collection in 2019 and found many parallels in Eliasson’s works, which she delighted in. As for Berragan, she had the chance to visit a house he designed in Mexico where she met someone who’d worked with the late architect and explained to her his creative processes, and the way he handled the link between light and colour.

Wanting to create the effects of a prism on jewels, Choisne sought to find a way to make holographic jewellery, something that’s never existed in the world of jewellery. When she shared her ideas with her team, they responded with a mix of fright and joy. Says Choisne: “They know they have a big challenge, but at the same time it’s quite fun to do something new. It’s a mixed feeling of stress and excitement, but we’re very much together in on it.”

To make it happen, Boucheron’s team discovered Saint-Gobain, a French company that made mirrors in the past but now produces high-performance materials for a variety of applications. Saint-Gobain had the capability to create a holographic effect but had never tried it on jewels.

It was a challenge, but the team succeeded – from discovering three rare opals, a 10.38-carat pear-cut and rose-coloured opal and a 30.98-carat blue-green cabochon opal from Australia and a 50.95-carat pearly white opal from Ethiopia, which became the central stones of the Illusion rings, to slicing rock crystal to a thickness of less than 2mm and applying a holographic effect to them.

“It’s poetic and futuristic at the same time,” says Choisne says of the Holographique necklace, deeming it a personal highlight in the collection. “I love the fact that craftsmen successfully hid the moving parts of the necklace, even though all of the necklace was transparent with the rock-crystal blades, making it really flexible.”

Continuing with the epic of Fleurs Éternelles, the Chromatique sees each petal of peony and pansy moulded in white ceramic, which Boucheron’s craftsmen had to shape by hand. The material is then adorned with holographic coating and turned into a pair of rings and a brooch, taking the treasured floral theme to new realms.

It’s not only Choisne’s methods and imagination that are forward-thinking at Boucheron, but its new campaigns break with tradition by capturing the zeitgeist of contemporary culture. High jewellery is not confined to the necks and arms of women; men can wear jewellery too – and wear it well. “In the last Contemplation collection, we started putting jewellery on men,” says Choisne when we touch on the topic.

“For me, I didn’t care whether it was men or women. What’s important for me is the aesthetic effect. I really thought some pieces worked differently when they were worn by a man or a woman. In this collection, for example, when you saw the brooches on men, it became so much more interesting. So for each piece, I’d ask myself, ‘What’s the best aesthetic result?’ That’s how we decided to put several pieces on men.”

The post Boucheron’s Carte Blanche Holographique High Jewellery Collection is Light Years Ahead appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Shop our selection of fine jewellery rings that anyone and everyone can incorporate into their everyday wardrobe.

Bvlgari B.Zero1 Rock

Inspired by the distinctive form of the Colosseum in Rome, Bvlgari's B.Zero1 Collection disrupted the industry at its unveiling in 1999. An ultimate symbol of self-expression, it remains a bestseller among women and men. The latest iteration, with a new studded core for a total rock 'n' roll vibe, is aptly named the B.Zero1 Rock Collection.

Chaumet Torsade de Chaumet

Who says men can’t wear high jewellery? The Torsade de Chaumet ring in white gold and diamonds are perfect complements to a black-tie look. Chaumet’s new Torsade (twist) collection is dynamic and refreshingly modern, capturing the essence of movement within its swirling silhouette.

Following the launch of the high jewellery collection, Chaumet took inspiration from it to create a solitaire ring (pictured on the right) that shows off the tight twist of diamonds in a more wearable fashion — it's perfect as an engagement ring, or just for anyone who's looking for that extra bling.

Chanel Coco Crush

Borrowed from equestrianism and popularised by the fashion world, the quilted motif is now immortalised in jewellery. The Chanel Coco Crush collection of rings in the house’s proprietary beige, yellow or white gold, and dusted with brilliant white diamonds, is a timeless addition to any wardrobe for any occasion.

Boucheron Holographique

Boucheron jewellery designer Claire Choisne has never doubted that men look as good in jewellery as women — case in point being the campaign photos for her latest Carte Blanche collection, where a male model fabulously flaunts the signet ring-like Illusion pieces featuring fabulous opals from Australia and Ethiopia (pictured above).

Boucheron has applied the same holographique technique to its main collections, including the Quatre ring, for a sensational new jewellery capsule. The ring is an absolute testament to Choisne's skills and the brand's avant-garde DNA: white gold, holographic ceramic and diamonds come together to truly stunning effect.

The post 4 Fine Jewellery Rings Designed to be Worn by Anyone and Everyone appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

Delving into the brand’s archives for fresh inspiration, Boucheron’s Creative Director Claire Choisne presents a high jewellery Art Deco collection made for the women, and men, of today.

The post Boucheron’s high jewellery Art Deco collection is not just for women appeared first on The Peak Magazine.

Delving into the brand’s archives for fresh inspiration, Boucheron’s Creative Director Claire Choisne presents a high jewellery Art Deco collection made for the women, and men, of today.

For more stories like this, visit www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg.

We often limit ourselves to clothing trends and forget that jewelry is an important part of the fashion industry. But things changed drastically with the COVID completely taking control of our lives in a way that no one anticipated. With Zoom meetings and working from home, culture took precedence over the face-to-face meetings, there has been a substantial transformation in…

The post Top Jewelry Trends to Watch For in 2021 appeared first on The Luxe Insider.